The State, last episode.

This blog has kindly given itself permission to address matters other than BBC bias, although (arguably) much of our grumbles can be traced back to the BBC.

So, unapologetically, this is another post about The State. Yes, it was shown on Channel 4. If you’re looking for BBC-only content, you need to take a right at the crossroads and straight on - you can’t miss it.

There has been quite a lot of coverage of Peter Kosmisnky’s four part series about British would-be jihadis and jihadi brides.  Opinion is divided, but one particular complaint was unanimous. Most critics thought that the drama needed a back story. What, they wanted to know, led these particular characters to radicalisation? 

If you’re looking for answers, Peter Kosminsky isn’t going to be providing them. 

Kosminsky has been telling the media that he and his team spent eighteen months trawling through reams of testimony and guidance from witnesses and experts on Islam.  

(Otherwise how could a 61 year old middle-class Bafta-winning film-maker justify making a ground-breaking film about the subject?)

I’m sure he believes he knows enough - at least enough to take a selection of interesting anecdotes and string them together into a gritty award-winning work.

As human beings we’re all capable of holding dozens of contradictory beliefs and opinions at once. Cognitive dissonance, isn’t it?  

Here, the script delivered, and we were expected to swallow, leading characters so full of cognitive dissonance that the finished product came across as a string of anecdotes cobbled together - that’ll do - and very heavy reliance on the acting and Kosminsky’s cinematographic expertise to see it through. 

One example of what seemed to be an isolated  ‘interesting factoid’ thrown in for the sake of it, was protagonist Jalal being advised to speak Arabic, not English, because the particularly volatile knife-wielding psychopath and beheader-in-chief had ‘a thing’ about Brits. I can almost hear Kosminsky’s team saying “That’s interesting, we’ll use that one.”  

Another was the pick ’n’ mix assortment of individuals amongst the new recruits, like a box of Milk Tray. One blonde, one German, one ex-squaddie, one long-haired lover from Liverpool and one or two nutty centres that no-one likes.

I did wonder whether the palatial ‘married quarters’ we saw were based on fact. Also, the sudden appearance and departure of Jalal’s father was an odd and implausible vehicle for the introduction of a ‘reasonable’ voice into the mix. In the final episode, the viewer is urged to sympathise with the disillusioned escapee rather than the nasty security services agent who makes her an offer she can’t refuse.  

I’m not saying that Peter Kosmisnky is sitting there going “fooled y'all!”. I think his liberal leftie mindset is sincere, visceral and limiting. He can’t conceive of any starting point other than his own, so his characters are inherently empathetic, sensitive and human, with inexplicable tacked-on bouts of inhumanity and stupidity. The story made little or no attempt to explore the psychological trauma of the sexual and imaginative repression inflicted upon followers of  ‘conservative’ Islam. One might take that omission as typical liberal leftie denial.

Some good comments on Harry’s Place. For example commenter Sarka relays some observations from Jonathan Spyer on Facebook.

Spyer:
"You may remember Peter Kosminsky as the British dramatist who reimagined Israeli Jews as Norwegian-looking people who all live in mansions with swimming pools in 'The Promise.' He has now topped this feat of the imagination with his new series, 'The State', which reimagines British recruits to ISIS as cheery yet sensitive types looking for dignity and to make a better world. Kosminsky exemplifies the played out west European haute bourgeoisie, fascinated and enchanted by the people who want to rip them apart. An astonishing marker of the times.”

Sarka
Later in the discussion he like others said that Kosminsky's decision not to go into the question of motivation (characters' back-stories) is a weakness, but also reflects his inability to conceive of people genuinely having religious and ultra-nationalist motivations...the characters are therefore "lightly romanticised" by presentation as basically nice decent lefty-ish types whose (essentially secular) idealism and youth just causes them to make a mistake

Spyer:
"For those with strong stomachs: the drama concluded last night with a portrayal of a Yezidi slave girl who fell in love and offered herself sexually to her kind British jihadi captor (who nobly refused her advances), evidence of ISIS men executed because they refused to fight their fellow 'resistance' members in the YPG (whaaaaat) and a depiction of IS atrocities in the context of atrocities committed against them by their (supposed) great rivals - Assad's army. A peek into the deeply strange world not of Sunni jihadis, who aren’t like this at all, but of British white lefties. Truly repulsive"

The State (episode 3)

Isn’t it odd that as soon as you realise that someone who you’ve admired is a run-of-the-mill antisemite your admiration instantly slams into reverse?

For example I used to like Brian Sewell’s acerbic critiques of pretentious art until he said something about “Manchester’s greedy Jews. I mean how many of Manchester’s greedy Jews would a self-regarding old queen who makes a living out of sneering actually know? See what I mean? One minute you like, next you don’t.

Anyway, this might apply to me and Peter Kosmisnsky. I have to admit his films have their good points. Like Ken Loach, perhaps. But having seem the third episode of ‘The State’ I’m wondering if I’ve been over-estimating him.

Yesterday I gave the film credit for aiming beyond the superficial message, “it’s so awful no-one’s gonna want to run away and join Isis”. I put forward the hypothesis that he was sending a more ambitious and perhaps subliminal signal, i.e., ISIS has got (the real) Islam all wrong; true Islam is peaceful.

Maybe, after all, he is only saying is that joining Islamic State is less romantic than running away to join the Foreign Legion, (isn’t that what the disenfranchised used to do?) so don’t do it. 

Anyway the drama slid into farce during last night’s episode. Two scenes in particular were positively cartoonish. Number one was a ‘slave market’ where the histrionic sobbing and cowering reminded me of a rather sophisticated sixth-form production of Les Mis.

Number two. The prize for the most implausible scene showed our feisty female heroine, the doctor (no, not that doctor) risking death by making a clandestine, unchaperoned visit to the only ‘nice’ man she’d come across since she arrived, a doctor colleague at the hospital. She had a cunning plan. To avoid becoming the second wife of a horrid scary man, she proposed marriage to her  unmarried colleague, only to deduce from his momentary hesitation a deadly secret that no-one else had ever spotted. “Are you gay?” (He was.) I can’t be the only one who found that scenario particularly laughable. 

There are several other unanswered questions, too numerous to list, though I would quite like to know what happened to the defiant ‘singing’ slave when the non-English-speaking shahid went to paradisio, leaving his distraught widow behind.

I do understand all those people who say they’re not going to watch it on principle, but I’m not one of them. Let me rephrase that. “I’m not a refusenik, but I can understand those that are.” 

I caught the tail end of Channel 4 News, where an interview with Peter Kosminsky was just winding up. Unfortunately I missed it, but I wonder if he was justifying the film and/or defending his own credibility as an authority on the subject, as he did with The Promise. 

Nothing to do with Islam

I have been watching Peter Kosminsky’s Channel 4 series 'The State' and also reading the reviews. They are diverse. 

The Telegraph, for example, takes it seriously. At first  Michael Horgan approaches his 4 star review as if it were just any old drama.  Then he goes into the moral  issues.

“This wasn’t easy viewing but it was eye-openingly powerful. Based on exhaustive research and first-hand accounts, its authenticity shone through.”

I understand that “Bafta-winning director Peter Kosminsky” is boasting that eighteen months of research went into the production. Well, good for him. What does that mean, though? Not a lot.

Remember his much praised four-parter “The Promise”? He and his team allegedly put a couple of years into ‘researching’ that, but he still came up with a biased and twisted portrait of Israel, past and present. Even more galling, he put himself up as an educator, taking part in online chats about the Israel - Palestinian conflict as if he sees himself as some kind of historian and authority on the Middle East. The public lapped it up. How many of the public who hung gratefully upon his every word are aware that not long afterwards Kosmisnsky was sitting on panels alongside anti-Zionist committees and PSC campaigners, denouncing Israel for all he was worth?

Christopher Stevens, reviewing the series in the Daily Mail takes a more robust approach. Firstly, he criticises Channel Four for not postponing the series in view of the recent terrorism in Barcelona. Then he says the film is making ISIS ‘cool’. 

“It is sickening. But it isn’t the gore and scattered limbs that leave a tight knot in the stomach: it is the moist-eyed adulation as The State pleads with us not just to sympathise with the British jihadis but to love them.”

 However, this is the part that the other reviewers are unlikely to mention.

“No one will be surprised to discover that the writer and director of the State, Peter Kosminsky, is not a veteran of the civil war in Syria. He did not carry out research missions to Raqqa and Aleppo.  

In fact, middle-class film-maker Kosminsky is 61 years old and Oxbridge-educated, the epitome of the London media luvvie who is desperate to demonstrate that he is less racist than anyone else at his Hampstead dinner party. He’s been the subject of a South Bank Show profile by Melvyn Bragg. You get the picture. 

The dialogue of The State gives him away at every moment. It’s Dad-speak, a middle-aged man’s failed effort to sound ‘down with the kids’, which parrots comical slang last used in the 1970s by the Bay City Rollers – words such as ‘super-cool’. 

In tonight’s opening scene, one fighter waves his AK47 and shouts: ‘This is better than flipping burgers!’ It’s meant to be a victory shout – but instead, the line is fake, patronising and, in its assumption that well-educated British Asians like him are destined to work at McDonald’s, dismissively racist. 

Kosminsky’s dead ear for dialogue is matched by his inability to smell out lies. Because all the scenes are based on second-hand research, they mirror the propaganda videos that cascade on to the internet, showing life under Sharia law. Much of the series consists of the director’s attempts to capture the camera angles common in phone videos of battlefields and marketplaces. 

It’s baffling that a man who knows how the television world works – he won Emmys and Baftas for his adaptation of Wolf Hall, after all – seems blind to the crass manipulation of Islamic State’s official videos. Kosminsky believes that the choreographed beheadings and the carefully curated aftermath of bombings are true and accurate depictions of ISIS life.

Now, let’s be clear. We have only seen two out of four episodes and they are indeed compelling cinematically. My theory is that we might be shown the futility, the gore, the death and the dirt, but I bet the main message we’ll be encouraged to take away from Peter Kosminsky is that Islamic State (so-called) is a perversion of Islam. 

There are already a few hints at that. For example “Single mother Shakira (Ony Uhiara)” who “wanted to deploy her skills as a junior doctor in a Raqqa hospital” is surprised to find that she must obey all the extreme modesty regulations and restrictions as an inferior woman, despite having much needed medical skills. The fact that she was unprepared for that situation seems highly implausible, but that aside, she is continually correcting her ‘masters’ over koranic principles. She knows more than they do about their religion! 

Islam is not so bad after all! See? We’re going to be told by Peter Kosminsky (I’m prepared to stick my neck out here) that the real Islam is a peaceful religion, and has nothing whatever to do with ISIS.